Daryl Gates, the notorious Los Angeles Police Chief who oversaw the LAPD dur- ing the Rodney King beating and the bloody riots that erupted when the racist attitudes that permeated his department were revealed, died April 16. Gates had a drug addicted son, but in 1989 told a US Senate committee that “casual marijuana smokers should be taken out and shot.”

He co-founded the D.A.R.E. program on the premise that it is too dangerous to tell children the truth about cannabis because it is not scary enough, so the cur- riculum was based instead on lies.

Attorney Irwin Ravin, 70, who challenged the boundaries of Alaskan law in 1973 when he forced police to arrest him for cannabis and made the case at trial that banning possession in a person’s home of small amounts of cannabis was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, died April 11. In the groundbreaking Ravin v Alaska (1975), the Alaska Supreme Court agreed that adults having small amounts of cannabis is a private issue, and outlawing it violates one’s rights. The ruling stands after over 35 years of legal battles. In 1982, the Alaska legislature decided that less than four ounces was a personal amount. In 2006, the legislature passed a new ban, claiming that cannabis was much stronger than it used to be, but it is unclear whether this is in conflict with the Ravin ruling.

“The Ravin decision in 1975 was then, and remains still today, 35 years later, the most

Read More: Ravin’s 1975 privacy case legalized pot in Alaska

At the 2009 Doo Dah parade.

Steve Lawrence, dedicated father, community activist and advocate for patients rights in Orange County and Southern California recently passed at the age of 60. He opened the first storefront collective in Anaheim, to continual harassment from law enforcement. His home was raided and his disabled son taken. After a long legal battle his son was returned and the charges were dismissed.

Lawrence stuck to his conviction that cannabis must be available to all who suffer. He helped develop tinctures and edibles to eliminate the risks of smoking. He worked closely with OC NORML, ASA and other groups. Many doors were opened by Steve and many patients suffered less because of him. — William Britt Assn of Patient Advocates

Ester Fride

Ester Fride, the Israeli scientist who showed that a newborn mammal cannot suckle and survive without a functional cannabinoid messaging system, died on New Year’s Day at the age of 56. The cause was lung cancer, diagnosed in July 2008.

In the 1990s Fride worked in the lab of Raphael Mechoulam, where the focus was on cannabinoids and how they worked. Receptors activated by plant- and synthetic cannabinoids had recently been identified — the CB1 receptor in the brain and central nervous system, the CB2 receptor in the immune system — and the search was on for the body’s endogenous (“endo-“) cannabinoids to which these receptors normally respond.

In 2000 Fride was given her own lab to direct and began studying the role of the endocannabinoid system in the nursing process.

She injected newborn mouse pups with an “antagonist” drug that binds to the CB1 receptor (preventing the endocannabinoids from doing

Read More: Ester Fride, Israeli cannabinoid researcher

John Irwin, a uniquely San Francisco raconteur who proudly referred to himself as a rogue, died January 3, 2010, at the age of 80.

Known internationally as an expert on the American prison system, John began his journey from criminal to criminologist by dabbling in ‘the life’ as a young adult — resulting in a five year sentence in Soledad prison during the 1950s.

John was often called the Horatio Alger of ex-convicts. After his release from prison he earned a BA in sociology from UCLA and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. His dissertation, “The Felon,” published in 1970, became a classic in the field of criminology. John became a professor of sociology at San Francisco State U. in 1967, where he taught for 27 yearsand founded Project Rebound, a degree program for ex-offenders.

During his career, Dr. Irwin, known as a ‘radical criminologist,’ was a prolific writer who

Read More: Jon Irwin, renowned criminologist and author